MARITIME

We provide all-weather monitoring for effective maritime situational awareness, to support the detection of illegal or irregular activity at sea and to make maritime activities safer and more efficient.

With our global geographical scope and range of different resolutions and sensor types, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver high-quality imagery and data. We also offer value-added services, including activity detection, and identifying and classifying vessels.

TIPPING AND CUEING

Tipping and cueing with GEOSAT’s sensors provides essential information for effective maritime situational awareness and for the detection of illegal or irregular activities at sea.

OUR OFFER

Cost effective monitoring solution coordinating Medium Resolution (MR) detection product, such as GEOSAT 1, and Very High Resolution (VHR) identification product, such as GEOSAT 2, for a synergistic tipping and cueing.

TIPPING AND CUEING SERVICE

Coordinated activities between sensors with different spatial and spectral resolutions are crucial for maritime surveillance, especially in locations that are very distant from each other and where having people on the ground is difficult. Our satellite imagery is the perfect source of information to monitor overseas territories in areas such as the South China Sea and Antarctica. It allows to capture reliable imagery and it ensures accurate and timely monitoring over sites located in remote areas where it’s difficult to get up to date and reliable information otherwise. Both satellites are operated continuously through a 24/7/365 service. On the other hand, ground stations management ensures a contact in each orbit allowing to command and download data every 90 minutes.

Tipping and cueing proved very useful for maritime surveillance including vessel monitoring and tracking, ship detection and identification. Thus, GEOSAT’s imagery is the perfect solution to feed integrated maritime services with fresh and reliable information as well as to support maritime control activities.

THE DISPUTED SOUTH CHINA SEA

GEOSAT 1 & GEOSAT 2 launched a monitoring campaign to acquire archive imagery over the South China Sea and to demonstrate the coordinated use of the two satellites for imagery intelligence applications: the wide-swath and the Medium Resolution (MR) of GEOSAT 1 and the more narrow-swath and Very High Resolution (VHR) GEOSAT 2.

GET THE BROAD PICTURE IN NEAR REAL TIME

The synergistic tipping and cueing technique allow to collect information by coordinating activities between GEOSAT’s sensors. This methodology consists in tasking one satellite with a wide swath to get a broad picture of a hotspot and detect possible changes, activities, and elements of interest. A careful analysis of the data collected provides a general overview and critical knowledge that can be used as a base map to then task other satellites with different spectral and spatial resolutions such as GEOSAT 2. In addition, having different spectral bands is very useful to highlight and better detect vessels and ships, while the very high spatial resolution is important to identify them.

In addition, GEOSAT’s 24/7/365 emergency service ensures delivery in Near Real Time - 30 minutes from acquisition.

CHANGE DETECTION

• 1st monitoring period: dredging and construction activities are clearly visible.
• 2nd monitoring period: the airstrip starts to be built up along with the point defense in the left corner and the construction site where radar/sensor arrays will be placed.
• 3rd monitoring period: the central part of the island is fully covered by lots of new constructions.
• After 2 years of construction work: the facilities on the island include an airstrip, radar/sensor arrays, hangars, mobile missile shelters, and point defenses.
• Last monitoring period: large underground structures likely intended to house munitions and other essential materiel have been completed and entirely buried.

SYNERGISTIC TIPPING AND CUEING OVER ANTARCTICA

Following the recent developments in Antarctica, GEOSAT launched a campaign to monitor the Larsen C ice shelf and the freshly calved A68 iceberg with GEOSAT 1 and GEOSAT 2. It is specially complicated to get pictures of Antarctica because of its long winter nights and the frequent cloud cover. Scientist had to rely mainly on polar satellites such as Sentinel-1, which use radar to see through dense cloud cover and regardless light conditions. Nonetheless, GEOSAT’s sensors managed to capture exclusive optical imagery.

GEOSAT 1 was specifically designed to timely monitor vast regions, thanks to its very wide 650-km wide swath. Additionally, GEOSAT 2 very-high resolution data is a key source of information to detect changes in incredible detail that complement ground assessment information. Thanks to the very high revisit frequency of both sensors, 2 days average revisit time worldwide for GEOSAT 2 and 3 days for GEOSAT 1, a synergistic use of both sensors ensures a remarkable capacity of imaging the Earth’s surface cloud-free.

The images captured over Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf since the calving of the Iceberg A68, allowed to perform a change detection and a multitemporal comparison of the berg’s trajectory.

In this campaign, a synergistic tipping and cueing was carried out, collecting information and coordinating activities between GEOSAT’s sensors. Thanks to its wide swath and high revisit time, GEOSAT 1 pinpointed where the main developments were going on in the Larsen C ice shelf and its surroundings; then, this information was used to task the very-high-resolution GEOSAT 2 over the identified areas, to get much more detailed imagery that allowed a very accurate measurement of the crack’s extension. This procedure of tipping and cueing was applied reversely too, when GEOSAT 2 captured a fraction of a large area and thereupon GEOSAT 1 was tasked to cover its whole extent.

DEFINE YOUR CRITERIA TO TRIGGER OUR IMAGERY SERVICE!

KEY BENEFITS

OUR APPROACH

We work with our partners, using our high-quality imagery and analytics expertise to extract insights that help you make the right decisions.